‘Scape­goat’ of­fi­cer pre­dicted train driver short­fall

ces can­celled – yes­ter­day broke his si­lence to blame the union and Gov­ern­ment for the saga.

He said union-ne­go­ti­ated crew breaks that com­pli­cated ros­ter­ing were squarely to blame for mass can­cel­la­tions that plagued the net­work from Oc­to­ber last year after the open­ing of the Red­cliffe line and in­tro­duc­tion of a new timetable.

But a se­cret re­port writ­ten by Mr Wright in May 2013 shows that, even be­fore the new rules and timetable, he fore­saw the im­pend­ing trou­ble.

His Work­force and Re­source Plan 2013-18, seen by The Courier-Mail, said de­mand would far out­strip driver num­bers by De­cem­ber 2016 – that’s just three months after the prob­lems ac­tu­ally hap­pened.

“If ser­vices con­tin­ued un­der cur­rent op­er­at­ing mod­els (ie ‘busi­ness as usual’), a gap of 28 driv­ers per month and 33 guards per month (av­er­aged over five years) has been iden­ti­fied over com­ing years,” it said.

But Mr Wright told the ABC there would have been no is­sues last year if it hadn’t been for the new union breaks.

Drop­ping them would have fixed the prob­lem “straight away”. He said he had been frus­trated that for­mer trans­port min­is­ter Stir­ling Hinch­liffe had not lis­tened to his ad­vice.

“I think that I was a scape­goat for some­thing that could have been fixed had the right peo­ple taken ac­tion to lis­ten to